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THE MILLIONAIRE MAKER

Act, Think, and Make Money the Way the Wealthy Do

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE WEALTH CYCLE Money in Motion

Even without winning the lottery, your chances of becoming a millionaire are a lot better than you think. In fact, if you have the desire and conviction to be wealthy, you have a better chance of generating and, more important, sustaining wealth than someone who has won the lottery. This book will take all the mystery out of wealth building. I believe that anyone can take a prescriptive, step-by-step approach to eliminate financial hardship and build wealth of a million dollars or more. And I don't mean just net worth; I mean cash flow—cold, hard cash in your pocket. Those of you who know that cash flow is king understand that I am talking about something real. This book provides that prescription. It's not a magic wand. There are no platitudes or clichés, slaps on the backs or pom-poms. Most wealthy people get that way not by chance, but by taking specific, tangible action. This book is about taking action to generate wealth and make you a millionaire, precisely and methodically.

If I handed you $10,000 right now and you did not understand how to put it into the Wealth Cycle Process, then you would be no closer to generating wealth than you were before you had it. That's because most of us grew up living in a Lifestyle Cycle.

PROFIT AND LOSS STATEMENT

In the Lifestyle Cycle, wealth can never be built because money that comes in goes right out again to support perishable, onetime-use consumption. And in many Lifestyle Cycles, money is spent, thanks to credit cards, even before it's earned. Conversely, in the Wealth Cycle, money coming in supports assets—that is, money-making resources—that will generate cash flow and create wealth.

The difference between having wealth and not having wealth is the difference between living in a Lifestyle Cycle and living in a Wealth Cycle. A person earning $14,000 a year who understands the concept of a Wealth Cycle has a 100 percent better chance of building and sustaining wealth than a person who makes $1 million a year and lives in a Lifestyle Cycle. And so although it would be nice of me to hand you $10,000, it's better if I teach you about the Wealth Cycle Process.

You Want Passive Income, Not a Passive Life

The Wealth Cycle Process shows you how to continually make money by increasing your assets, thus creating a Cash Machine to feed those assets and steadily building your passive income so you can expand your wealth and live larger. Too many experts tell you to live small, spend nothing, and barely breathe as you dawdle off into the horizon. That sounds just awful to me. I believe it is possible to achieve wealth and have a latte with breakfast. Even if your debt seems utterly daunting, the Wealth Cycle Process will help you spiral your debt down while you spiral your wealth up. That is how the wealthy do it, and it's how you'll do it too. In 1991, when Donald Trump was $900 million in debt, it's pretty clear he didn't shrink his life and focus on reducing his debt. Instead he found a way to rebuild his wealth so that it surpassed and soon eliminated his debt, creating one of the greatest financial turnarounds in history.

While many financial experts are earnest professionals trying to make a living, they can't help the fact that they are commission-oriented and tend to be conservative. Their interest is to keep your money in safe-and-sound accounts. But safe-and-sound accounts aren't so safe and sound anymore. The behavior of a few executives at a handful of companies can cause the entire stock market to swing. Global events, such as terrorism or instability in emerging markets, can cause bonds to sink. Pension funds default, the Social Security system seems shaky, and retirement plans can disappear. These days, all those planning strategies that seemed secure and conservative aren't. Sometimes, putting your financial plan in the hands of someone else is the riskiest thing you can do.

The United States of America was founded on the principles of initiative, resourcefulness, teamwork, and leadership. Abdicating responsibility to a sovereign was shunned, and accountability and opportunity celebrated. Yet less than 7 percent of our population knows how to generate wealth. There was never a class in this, your parents weren't given a special wealth manual to pass down to you, and financial planners have no incentive to teach you what they get paid to do for you. If you make the decision to do for yourself, you create the capacity to be wealthy.

A Year from Now You'll Wish You'd Started Today

You can make the decision to make a lot of money at any age and in any stage of your life. The Wealth Cycle Process will meet you wherever you are. Whether you have a solid net worth and are looking to increase your returns or are deeply in debt, can't forego your day job, and want to be free of money worries once and for all, I will help you become a millionaire, a multimillionaire, and beyond, depending on your personal goal. No matter who and where you are, wealth building is well within your grasp. You just need to step up to the plate.

The 12 Building Blocks of the Wealth Cycle

Just as every person's life is particular to them, so must each person's wealth plan be tailored to the individual. The Wealth Cycle Process is based on 12 building blocks that you will employ in your own fashion, depending on your specific requirements and objectives.

Building Blocks of the Wealth Cycle

Each building block is explained in detail throughout this book, but briefly they are defined as follows:

1. Gap Analysis: An innovative financial model that will create a map from where you are to where you want to go.

2. Financial Baseline: An overview of your current financial situation in the form of a basic profit and loss statement that includes revenue and expenditures and a balance sheet that includes assets and liabilities.

3. Freedom Day: The realization of each goal, starting with 120-day objectives and accelerating beyond millionaire status.

4. Debt Management: A Five-Step Debt Elimination Plan that erases consumer debt, the greatest barrier to wealth building.

5. Entities: The organization of trusts, partnerships, and corporations that hold and service wealth and take advantage of the tax strategies devised by Congress and state legislatures to protect companies and help businesses grow.

6. Cash Machine: The fuel that accelerates the Wealth Cycle, which comes from your capacity to create more revenue from a legitimate business venture. You must learn to earn.

7. Wealth Account: The concept of pay-yourself-first by consistently committing a portion of earnings for investing, a portion we call WAPP, the Wealth Account Priority Payment.

8. Forecasting: A projection of your revenue, expenditures, assets, and liabilities and how to direct those numbers into companies that make full use of the tax code.

9. Assets: Direct and diversified asset allocation, which is essential to create passive income to feed the Wealth Cycle.

10. Leadership: You must learn to "lead your wealth." Though you may, and should, choose to delegate your wealth building, no one can drive the Wealth Cycle Process like you can.

11. Teamwork: You must build and direct a team of professionals to help you develop and execute your strategies and reach your goals. Wealth building is a team sport.

12. Conditioning: Financial way of thinking. As you accumulate the experience that gets results and gain the confidence to commit even more significantly to your wealth plan, you will develop a positive and healthy relationship with money.

When you begin the Wealth Cycle Process, you engage each and every building block: they are codependent and indivisible. You will always keep track of a Gap Analysis that will tell you how to get from where you are—your Financial Baseline—to where you want to go—your Financial Freedom Day. You will always employ Debt Management, and if you have or create consumer debt, you will always make it a priority to eliminate it immediately while simultaneously building your wealth. You will always have Entities (legally established companies), which means you'll always run your life like a business. And that means you'll always have a business, a Cash Machine, that will create more money for your Wealth Cycle. You will always run the right expenses through the right Entities, which means you will always be Forecasting. You will always be prioritizing a portion of your money into a Wealth Account used only for investing. And you will always be investing in Assets, and those assets will create more assets, and more and more assets. You will always support these activities with Leadership and Teamwork and be mindful of your financial way of thinking, or Conditioning.

All wealth plans begin with the first three blocks: Gap Analysis, Financial Baseline, and Freedom Day. These three blocks are continuously revised and adjusted throughout the process. Additionally, each person's wealth plan requires the bottom three foundational blocks: Leadership, Teamwork, and Conditioning. The middle building blocks, though engaged simultaneously, are used in different sequences and with different emphasis, depending on the needs and wants of the individual wealth builder. Proper sequencing is essential to the Wealth Cycle Process.

The Right Thing at the Right Time

The most common mistake I see in wealth building is people doing the right thing but at the wrong time: for example, paying down all existing debt before beginning to build wealth. In the Wealth Cycle Process, you begin the Five-Step Debt Elimination Plan and simultaneously create a Wealth Account that starts generating wealth for you.

I also see people maximizing their 401(k) payment and holding all the equity in their house. As you'll come to see, this is the wrong thing at the wrong time. In our sequence, you jump right into direct asset allocation. Other wealth advisors might call this irresponsible, but I believe you need as much cash available as you can pull together so you can invest now and start building wealth right away. Those who advise that you live in fear and maximize your money in qualified plans are actually hindering your efforts to accumulate wealth and build a millionaire plan.

Doing the right thing at the right time, namely, sequencing, is the foundation of the Wealth Cycle Process. This book will help you understand which building block sequence is right for you. The examples used throughout are selected from the thousands of people I've helped make millionaires and specifically highlight particular building blocks, as well as reflect the entire range of possible sequences. More important, at least one of the examples featured will mirror your own financial realities and goals. My hope is that the next time you and your friends are sitting around a dinner table, you'll be able to identify one another with one of these types, for example, "Oh, you are so Rick Noonan, you'd better start looking at your assets."

In every case we start with a Gap Analysis and the eight questions: (1) What is your monthly income? (2) What are your monthly expenditures? (3) What assets do you have? (4) What are your liabilities? (5) What else? (6) What do you want? (7) What skills do you use to make money? (8) Are you willing to create and execute the Wealth Cycle Process?

From these questions, we sequence the 12 building blocks of the Wealth Cycle. You'll examine this process through the stories of seven different people, each representing seven different routes to wealth. We start with the Leonard family members, who were threatened by a job loss and wanted to generate more income. Their case provides us with an introduction to the entire process and an overall look at each of the building blocks.

In each of the subsequent chapters, we show a different sequence and emphasize a different building block. For example, the Assets building block is brought into focus through the case of Rick Noonan, who made a good living but had several underperforming investments. The Cash Machine is explained in the discussion of Patricia Beasley, a single mother who started her own Web design firm. Kerry Kingsley, a business owner who was not retaining much of the revenue she brought in, portrays the need for Entities, and Forecasting is represented by Jim Quinlin, a victim of taxable money. The importance of the Wealth Account and the Wealth Account Priority Payment are clarified through the opulent lifestyle of Jean and John Jones, and math teacher Chuck Wallace's scenario sheds light on Debt Management.

You Don't Have to Be Ready—Just Go

After you've read through the examples, you will better understand sequencing and choose the right path for your specific needs. In fact, you'll probably start to anticipate your own sequence as you read through the examples in each chapter. But if by the time you're finished with this book you're still unsure of your personal sequence, I will connect you with one of my strategists for a free half-hour telephone session. The contact information is listed in the Resources section at the back of this book.

Getting Started

Wealth building is a dynamic, continuous process that consistently engages each building block. While some of the building blocks of the Wealth Cycle Process are more fun and exciting than others, they are all critical and doable. I know, because I did them by pushing my way past the same mental, emotional, and material stumbling blocks that you will encounter. I was a farm girl who knew it was much better to grow your own tomatoes than buy them, and I knew I had to plant my own seeds. I invested a small amount of money, I took a chance, and I've never given anyone sole power over my money since. The 12 building blocks of the Wealth Cycle give you control over your money and help you establish a lifelong wealth plan.

Eight minutes to a wealth plan for the rest of your life....

CHAPTER 2

THE GAP ANALYSIS Mapping Your Way to Millions

A few days after I spoke to the television producer, I collected some members of my wealth team who are experienced finance and investing coaches and we drove to Oakland, California to meet the Leonard family. As I was getting out of the car, I felt like John Wayne approaching some small town that needed saving. We strode up the walk, ready to face off against the family's financial frustrations and perceived failures.

Mary and Mike Leonard were all that the producer had promised. The couple was smart and dynamic, and they both wanted to start taking their financial situation seriously. Though they had a little bit of savings and a home that had appreciated over the years, they also had credit card debt, a salary that was going away, two sons in high school hoping to go to college, and no plan for their financial future.

After getting to know the family a little, talking to their sons, and seeing their home, I was ready to ask them eight questions that would help them map out a wealth plan they would use for the rest of their lives. I went right to the drawing board to create the schematic for these questions.

This schematic, or map, is the Gap Analysis:

At the bottom is the Financial Baseline—your current financial situation. At the top is the One-Year Freedom Day Goals—where you see yourself in one year. And in the middle we create a Wealth Cycle of assets that will in turn be used to create more and more assets, fed by a constant revenue stream coming from passive income and a Cash Machine.

Mary and Mike Leonard were intrigued but apprehensive. Mary's number one concern was losing her job.

"Losing your job was the best thing that ever happened to you," I said.

"It was?" Mary said. Her eyes scanned mine for a sanity check.

"Yes," I said. "You've been given the gift of urgency."

"That's a gift?" Mike said.

"Didn't you hear me?" Mary said. "I lost my job. I need to get another one."

I shook my head. "You are not going back to a job."

"I'm not?"

"No," I said.

She started to cry. Mary had always worked. She'd been brought up to believe that she had to put in 9 to 5, at least, for her money. I could sympathize. I had been similarly conditioned. I grew up in a large midwestern family with very traditional values. Whether I was plucking weeds from the bean field or tending to the cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, or rabbits, I was always reliably, unfailingly, living my myth—the same myth that Mary Leonard lived: work hard for your money.

Given my upbringing, it made a lot of sense that I would think like this. I was born to teenage parents who had little money. As a child, I did not know any wealthy people and I didn't have access to any Ivy League or country club networks. What I did have, what was handed down to me from my parents, was a strong work ethic. I started working hard for my money when I was young, helping with the family farm business. At 17, I established a health-training company, and when I was 19 and still in college I created a business that specialized in corporate wellness and human performance. I went on to study and receive various degrees in finance, human performance, exercise physiology, and organizational psychology, and by most measures I had a fairly good career, working for a major oil company, first as an employee and then as a consultant, and then learning my current business of wealth education and mentoring.

I'd always planned to be a millionaire by the time I was 35, but my plan took on a new meaning when I became a single mother. Terrified at the prospect of looming responsibilities, during my pregnancy I decided to put all my efforts into attaining more success in my business, finances, and personal life. And I did it. When I was six months pregnant and just two weeks shy of my thirty-fourth birthday, my net worth passed the million-dollar mark. I had to convince Mary and Mike Leonard that they needed to make this same commitment.

"Boy, is your glass half full," Mike said.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE MILLIONAIRE MAKER by Loral Langemeier. Copyright © 2006 by Loral Langemeier. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
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